


Becoming

by mautadite



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 16:38:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2316311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Her birth waters sang like rivers; my mother is now me.</i>
</p><p>After the war, Sansa visits Riverrun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> Summary and some amount of inspiration taken from [I Am Becoming My Mother](http://mautadite.tumblr.com/post/97225532942/i-am-becoming-my-mother-lorna-goodison) by Lorna Goodison.

The gates go up in front of them, baring the great courtyard to view, an island in the midst of the running waters. Riverrun’s sandstone walls and the majestic watchtower lie before them. It cannot be nostalgia that strikes her, but Sansa sways with emotion nonetheless.

She is prepared for the way her uncle Edmure’s jaw goes slack, the way his eyes go unfocussed, as if calling back to some lost memory, some ghostly scene in his mind. It had been the same with Brynden, when she’d met him for the first time at the Bloody Gate. It doesn’t need to be said, but they all say it anyway.

“You look so much like her.”

“Thank you,” Sansa replies, every time.

What else can she say? 

It is not quite a compliment, but that is the only thing she can understand it as. She vacillates between being sick of it (it had been all Petyr would bleat about, in the moments before she killed him; how much she looked like her mother, oh Cat, oh _Cat_ ) and clinging to the words with almost violent fervour. Their looks connect them now, Sansa and her mother. A few mementos, a childhood of memories cut too short, the words of those left behind, and the face she sees in the mirror. This is all she has.

They keep the greetings brief. The new lord of the Riverlands is surrounded by a constant air of haggardness despite his youth, and his little wife frets silently at his side. This war has not been easy on them either. Sansa says a few appropriate words, her uncle says a few back, and then Brienne mentions how long their journey has been. Soon, she is being shown to her room.

It is her first time at Riverrun. It might not have been, if things had gone differently, all those years ago. Things had _not_ gone differently; she’d remained in her gilded torture chamber in the capital, until her winding road led her here, finally. She finds that she has no bitterness to spare with the thoughts. It is hard to resent a dead man, especially her brother, especially Robb, who had always been so easy to love. Robb the king simply could not have ransomed her, she has been told by survivors of the northern army. Robb her brother… aye, he would have wanted to.

And her mother, the survivors tell her, Brienne tells her constantly, had wanted to more than anything. She would have moved all seven heavens to do it.

The castle is beautiful in the way only castles can be; gorgeously but sturdily built, with an air of being both timeworn and long-lived. All the Riverlands had been beautiful once too, she is given to understand, before the war had come, and the green fields and rich rivers were burnt and torn apart from all sides. Even the Twins, legendarily and carefully neutral until the last moment, have not escaped unscathed. Old Walder Frey’s brood is much depleted, the man himself dispatched to hell by some assassin’s hand. Some lord of King Stannis’ choosing now stands castellan for a young Frey grandson or great-grandson. Passing through the place had made Sansa uneasy, and she’d refused to spend the night.

No matter that a new lord now reigns; some ghosts are more than she can bear.

The servant guiding them leads them to a chamber that seems no different from the rest on the outside, but Sansa sees the way Brienne stiffens.

“Is this… did this belong to…”

Her knight nods. The movement of her yellow head is mournful, in a way.

“Yes, my lady. It was your mother’s.”

Sansa nods her thanks. She knows now to brace herself before the door swings open.

It looks no different on the inside, either. A vanity, a chest of drawers, a garderobe, a crackling fireplace, a large bed. Like any other room that formerly belonged to a highborn woman. It would have been occupied many times over, of course, when the keep was held by the Lannisters and Freys. Any bits and bobs of Catelyn Tully Stark’s have surely been long swept away. But part of Sansa remains tense, waiting for some sign or some omen of her mother’s continued presence to leap out at her.

It doesn’t come, not yet.

Suddenly exhausted, Sansa sits heavily on the bed. The servant girl explains that her things will be brought up shortly, and then disappears.

Brienne leans in the doorway.

“Is everything well, my lady?”

“Yes, yes, quite,” Sansa replies absently. She passes a hand over the smooth bedspread. Newly changed, of course, resplendent with wavy patterns of red, blue and silver. “Do you believe in ghosts, Brienne?”

Her scepticism is hard to miss. “Ghosts, my lady? I…”

“Oh, not to worry.” Sansa smiles, able to understand the worried expression that her knight wears. “I don’t think I do either. I just… I don’t know.”

Her mother had prayed to the seven southern faces of god. The room overlooks the sept in its garden enclosure, surrounded by honeysuckle and peach trees, and in the distance, the Tumblestone rushes by. Sansa crosses to the wide window to look down upon it. Her mother had told her about Riverrun’s sept, while they prayed together in Winterfell’s smaller, humbler sept. Seven-sided, carefully crafted, a tribute to the seven holies inside and out. What she sees as she gazes down fits perfectly with the picture painted in her mind, and the aching pain of remembrance blossoms in her chest.

“You should rest, my lady,” Brienne says; soft, unobtrusive. 

“Yes…” Sansa replies. She should. She will need it, to be prepared for the feast tonight. Everyone will want to see the lady of Winterfell. There will be her extended family to greet, the sons and wives of the bannermen who had fought for her brother, for her grandfather. There will be Robb’s widow to meet, abandoned by her family only to be welcomed by Lady Roslin. There will be suitors, inevitably, to fend off.

Sansa does not relish knowing that after all she’s lived, all she’s survived, she’s still seen as a juicy prize to be snapped up. But she is more than prepared to refuse all offers. Stannis had not been able to convince her to marry again, and what a king cannot do, no enterprising lord should attempt. She already has her heir; a wild little red-headed boy who only vaguely remembers her, who had called her ‘mother’ in a confused voice at first sight, still calls her mother at times and makes her cry. Leaving him in the care of the wildling woman at Winterfell had been hard at first, but Osha has been looking after Rickon for five years now. That is longer than Sansa had known him, as a child.

She wants the future to be better. They’re all Sansa has, her little family, fragmented as it is. She has Rickon, slowly learning to know her again. She has Bran, in her thoughts and her heart and the birds and the faces of the trees; she looks across the top of the godswood, and wonders if he will come to her tonight. She has Arya, sometimes; her little sister goes more than she comes, but every time she stays a little longer, loses a little of that cold, faceless look. She has Jon, (who is still her brother, even if the crannogman speaks true) even now guarding the realm, cleaning up after the filth and the terror. 

Most of all, perhaps, she has Brienne, her stalwart knight, who is slowly peeling back her layers, steadfastly carrying out her promise. She had loved Sansa’s mother, that much is easy to see, and she feels the affection and loyalty transferring to her more and more each day.

Smiling wanly, she lets herself be drawn away from the window gently. Her baggage is brought up, and Brienne dismisses the maids with a kind word, and helps Sansa out of her travelling things herself. Her fingers are big and slightly clumsy when not wielding a sword, but she’d gotten into the habit on the road, and manages the task efficiently enough.

“I shall have someone sent up, when it is time to prepare for the feast,” says Brienne afterwards, standing by the door. Her blue eyes are alight with kindly concern. “Please rest, my lady.”

“I will,” Sansa promises. “And Brienne? I meant what I said, about High Heart. Will you take me there, when time permits?”

Brienne’s face clouds over; with worry again, and no small dash of uncertainty. But she nods.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Thank you, ser.”

The door closes with a little thud. Sansa sits on the bed again, touches it with an absent hand. Not the coverings or the mattress, but the frame. It is made of some dark wood, and seems to have stood up to time. It may have well been here since her mother’s childhood, or before.

High Heart, they say, is where Lady Stoneheart met her final end. Closure is a difficult, inappropriate word; it is not what Sansa seeks, for she doesn’t think she’ll ever truly get it, not in this matter. But she wants to see, and know.

When she thinks too long about the Red Wedding, about the bodies of her mother and brother and the atrocities performed upon them, about all the people who died that night, Sansa becomes little again, and she wants to sob until her heart breaks and she no longer has to feel anything. She thinks perhaps she prefers this reaction to the anger and roiling hatred that strikes her betimes. 

Before she finally gave Theon over to his sister, Sansa had contemplated killing him. For his betrayal, the events that led to the Sack of Winterfell, all those years thinking her little brothers were dead, for the little boys and loyal servants who _had_ died in their stead. There would have been justice in it, to summon a headsman to take his head, or wield the sword herself as her father would have wanted, and hack away at his neck for as long as it took her. Sansa had thought about it, and wondered if she was becoming her mother, becoming the thing that Catelyn Stark had turned into after death, a creature sated only by vengeance and blood.

Her fingers, long and pale, stroke the satiny coverlet. Red, blue, silver. Family, duty, honour. She could not do it, of course, not when faced with the faded, broken reality of Theon Greyjoy. It was impossible to truly hate him, and she’d turned him over to the remains of his family with Stannis’ consent. Hatred is not for the Lysas and the Theons; it is for the Petyrs and the Boltons, and she swears, when they finally find the bastard of the Dreadfort, she will show him that she remembers. _Family, duty, honour._ She is her mother enough for that.

Catelyn Stark’s body has been buried, at long last, but she’s left her legacy dotted all over the Riverlands, in death, and perhaps in a few lives that she’d touched. They say that High Heart is home to ghosts; Sansa will find out for herself, soon enough.

Sansa lies back on the bed. The room around her, indeed the castle itself, is filled with potential mementos and treasures. The wardrobe might hide an old gown of her mother’s, never passed on to her sister or a servant. There might be an old brush, tangled with strands of burnished red. This could be the very bed on which Robb came into the world. Later, she will kneel before the seven faces of god in the sept where her mother knelt before her, walk the paths in the godswood where her mother might have played as a child. She will sit with a face that is both hers and not, and think on the times that have passed.

They say that High Heart is home to ghosts, but there is also one making a home in Sansa.

Tonight for the feast, the greetings, the politics and the intricacies of diplomacy. She will don her steel, and let them see the face she has cultivated. For now, Sansa sinks into the bed's embrace, draws the Tully colours up over herself. She allows herself to be porcelain, for a few hours. She allows herself to cry, and miss her mother.


End file.
